LING 200 Study Guide - Final Guide: International Phonetic Alphabet, Verb Phrase, Complementizer

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Peggy Antonisse

Document Summary

Linguists study human language and want to figure out how it works by building a model of the system that describes and explains how speakers naturally speak. Prescriptive grammar does not further this goal. Linguists are generally more interested in studying spoken language than written language as they use the spoken information to model the knowledge of one"s own native language. Be able to articulate the reasons we think sentences are hierarchically structured: constituents form larger groups that then form sentences (small constituent then joins bigger constituents then makes a sentence) Be able to articulate evidence for thinking humans have unconscious mental rules: think about whether or not rules are explicitly taught. They are not taught because we are able to come up with sentences we have never heard before. Phonetics- the study of the minimal units that make up a language (the sounds of speech) Phonology- the study of the distribution of sounds in languages.